


Saskatchewan, July 1998

by fearthainn



Series: TPDGA [2]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-01-01
Updated: 2002-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-06 01:46:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearthainn/pseuds/fearthainn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-TPDGA (spoilers)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saskatchewan, July 1998

**Saskatchewan, July 1998**

He wasn't expecting this.

He had lived his whole life in the shaded arms of trees, their green and damp enveloping him, wrapping around him, shielding his vision and preventing him from seeing too far or too well. He'd grown up in an emerald country, in a rich and growing world.

And now all he had was dust.

His father, chest collapsing in as he gasped out one last recrimination, the dirt that never seemed to quite wash off his hands and face, even his own pale skin and eyes and hair, lighter than the pale gold of the wheat that stretched out on both sides of this straight and dusty highway, in an unpronounceable province half a world away and light-years from everything he'd known before.

It was as if here in this dirt bowl of a country the blinders he'd always worn had been taken off his vision and he could see so far and so wide that it was dizzying. It left him breathless, shaken and terrified, afraid that the vast stretch of horizon would come and eat him whole. He could understand now how years ago, people thought the world was flat—it _looked_ flat, _felt_ flat, empty and barren, covered in nothing but grass and dirt, baked by the ever-present sun, kicked up by the ever-present wind that swept by with nothing to block or stop it.

"Nothin' between us and the North Pole but the odd reindeer," one of his rides had laughed, shifting the huge beast of a truck into a higher gear, the growl of the motor louder than anything he'd ever heard before in his old world. "Fuckin' cold in the wintertime, eh?"

He didn't think he'd last that long.

The last he remembered of England were Harry Potter's eyes, lush green like the country he'd fled, his hands covered in blood and flaking skin where his father had grabbed at him in his last gasping moments. But his father was dead now, his old life was dead, his whole world was dead, and all he had left was an endless sky in a foreign country, and it was the grit kicked up by the prairie wind that made his eyes tear up.

~*~

**Author's Note:**

> Written based on a prompt from the [15 Minute Ficlets](http://community.livejournal.com/15minuteficlets/) community on Livejournal.
> 
> The word was "dust".


End file.
